A variety of different applications have been developed which take advantage of the security and portability offered by smart cards. Examples of such include banking applications, electronic purses, loyalty programs and medical records storage. Whenever a smart card is to be employed for one of these applications, it must be inserted, or otherwise communicate with, a reader to which the application has access. Depending upon the applications, the readers can take a variety of different forms. For example, in banking applications, the reader might be present in an automated teller machine, whereas electronic purse applications might utilize readers within vending machines and at other points of sale. The deployment of readers represents one of the more demanding tasks associated with the utilization of smart cards in an application. Often, successful deployment of a sufficient number of readers to support the application requires significant commercial and marketing efforts.
Recently, a number of Internet-accessible applications have been developed that are capable of utilizing the features provided by smart cards. One example of such is a portal application that provides an owner of a smart card with personalized access to the Internet using single sign-on security and password data that is stored in the smart card, and therefore extremely portable. A limitation associated with these applications, however, is the fact that the user must have access to a reader in order to utilize them. While there exist ongoing efforts to equip computer terminals with readers, for example by incorporating them within the structure of keyboards, the dissemination of these readers is not sufficiently widespread to enable users to take serious advantage of the portability offered by the smart card. Even if the user has installed a smart card reader on his personal computer at home and/or at work, he is not able to access the smart card based Internet application from terminals at other locations.
To provide some degree of mobility, it is possible to equip a portable laptop or notebook computer with a smart card reader. For example, such a reader might be embodied within a PCMCIA card that is inserted in a slot of the portable computer. While this feature offers the ability to access the Internet application from a site other than the home or office computer, it still requires the user to have the portable computer in his possession, which is not always desirable or feasible. In addition, access to the Internet via a portable computer often takes place via a dial-up modem. For some Internet applications, the limited data transfer speeds associated with this type of access may restrict the user experience to the point where utilization of the application from a portable computer is not acceptable.
It is an objective of the present invention, therefore, to provide a mechanism that enables smart card based Internet applications to be deployed on a relatively widespread basis without requiring a large number of smart card readers to be installed at all the various locations from which a user might desire to access the applications.